


freefall

by besselfcn



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, POV Jaskier | Dandelion, POV Second Person, Period-Typical Homophobia, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, criminalized homosexuality, or at least a hopeful one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:41:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26026642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: Lettenhove is a city of walls, and they have been calling to you since you were old enough to wonder what lay beyond them.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 75





	freefall

**Author's Note:**

> This started with the thought _that guy at the beginning of TW3: Wild Hunt who tells you he was exiled and his noble boyfriend hung himself, but Jaskier is the boyfriend_ , and that's where it spiraled out into.

It does not _start_ when the boy is sent away, but it comes to a precipice then. 

Lettenhove is a city of walls, and they have been calling to you since you were old enough to wonder what lay beyond them. You go out on official business, of course — dragged along to beheadings and coronations, weddings and funerals. But you watch the journeymen and townspeople and paupers stream endlessly from within the city gates to without and wonder, always, what it would be like to simply _go._

(The foolish machinations of a pompous rich prick who doesn’t know how good he’s got it, you tell your friends years later at school. You leave out the heavy red welts from a willow switch that paint your thighs as you watch the parade.)

When you are twelve you befriend one of the guards and he shows you the passageway up, all sloping stairs that empty out onto a rush of cold, high air and dizzying drops. 

You take to sneaking out to see the walls at night. Then you take to looking at the ground. 

In all manner of things, you are good at only looking. Until the boy. 

The boy. _Nicolas._ Sometimes on quiet nights when no one is around to hear it you permit yourself to think his name. Nicolas Petrov, the butcher’s son, the criminal.

Not a criminal yet, when you meet him. At fourteen he is in training to take over his father’s post and follows along for deliveries to the estate. You follow along as well, meet them at the gate with the kitchen maid to get a glimpse of Nicolas’s dark, tight-curled hair and mouth that looks like it was set in crooked on his jaw. You look at him look at you, and one day he smiles and it carries you so strongly through the rest of the week that you don’t even climb the walls.

Eventually his father trusts him enough that he begins to make deliveries on his own, when weeks are busy. You pay the youngest kitchen maid twice her weekly salary to slip a note into the butcher’s payment next time the younger one is there alone. 

She gives you a look that looks very much like the one your father gives you sometimes. Years later, you realize it is pity. 

But she does it, and you find yourself waiting night after night at the public gardens where there aren’t any guards and there are plenty of shaded nooks to hide in and anyone off the street could wander in, that’s why they’re _public_ after all, your mother likes to say. 

Nicolas shows up the third night of anxious watch. 

At first you talk — just talk. You hear about the butcher’s trade in a level of detail that from anyone else might be stomach-churning, but from him feels simply _expert_ , like your tutor deconstructing poetry for you. You tell him about the inner workings of a vichy, and his face twists into a look like he’s eaten something sour and that might be when you fall in love, if you really think about it. 

After two of these nights you take him up the walls, knuckles gently curled up against each other’s while you watch the stars sparkle out over the fields. He points out his house to you, towards the edge of the merchant district. You point out yours to him, just behind the two of you, and he laughs and shoves you and you feel for a second like you’re in freefall. But it’s just his hand on your skin. 

You kiss him the fifth time. That festers in your stomach longer than you’d like to admit — that _you_ are the one who kissed _him_. 

After that you’re hungry. He’s hungry. You spend what feels like hours just curled away in dark corners of the garden, learning the different ways you can kiss someone and feel it deep into your bones. Neither of you know what to do with your hands so you grasp and grip at clothing, pull and pinch where the urge overtakes you but you’re careful. You’re so careful. You’re both so careful. 

You know the laws. You’re just young and foolish enough to think that it matters. 

It’s the gardener that finds you, one night when you were stupid enough to stay long enough that the sky started tinging pink but he’d been so late and just a moment longer, just a moment—

The gardener tells the groundskeep; the groundskeep tells the butler. The butler tells your father. 

Nicolas Petrov, the butcher’s son, fourteen years old, is tried and convicted for sodomy. You aren’t allowed at the trial after you rage and spit at your father that he _didn’t_ , nothing like that _happened_ , it isn’t criminal to _kiss_ someone. 

“The crime is in his heart,” your father explains, patient, while two guards restrain you by the arms. “If a man walked into court and told you he intended to commit murder, would you set him free as no crime has yet been done?”

The rage grows so hot inside you that you can’t speak anymore. Your father takes this as capitulation, and motions for you to be escorted out. 

He’s fourteen so his sentence is lenient; no jail time, no corporal punishment. He’s simply banished; he and his family are to leave Lettenhove at earliest possible convenience, upon penalty of sanction if they are ever to return. 

Send me away too, you tell your father, when one of the guards who has always had a soft spot for you tells you what the sentence is. If he’s being sent away, I should, too, shouldn’t I?

“You’ve committed no crime,” your father says, level and dark. “Have you, Julian?”

You forget much of what the next three days are like. 

On the third day you get word that the Petrovs are finally leaving. You scale the walls that evening to watch them go — you keep careful watch on that house Nicolas pointed out those weeks ago. But the lights are already out by the time you got up there, and it’s too dark to see any faces in particular in the cascade of people that leave the city at night. 

You stay up there until it’s dark, until the torchlights from the peasant district have burned out low. 

Then you follow him, straight over the forty foot drop. 

They hire a sorceress. You don’t remember them, but you remember waking up two inches taller than before. 

“He’s a damn piece of work, is what he is.”

“Then send him to school,” your mother argues. “When he’s well again. He needs something to exercise his mind, that’s all, keep him away from pursuits like this.”

Poppy milk tastes rancid, particularly when it’s being poured down your throat.

And then you’re awake, like nothing has ever happened, like nothing will ever happen. You have now a nasty scar up the back of one leg, a lifelong distaste for the smell of cleansing lemon oil, and admission upon earliest convenience to the continent’s most prominent school of arts and letters.

* * *

After a decade of travel with Geralt, when you finally work up both the nerve and the boredom to tell him the abridged version of the story, he asks, “Did you see him again?”

Who?

“That... boy. The one who was exiled. You’re well-traveled. Just wondered if you’d ever run into him again, out there on the road.”

Oh, you say. No. No, I haven’t.

You don’t add that you don’t want to. You don’t add that you think he might despise you. You don’t add that he’s got every right to. 

* * *

At Oxenfurt, you flirt with men, women, and the idea of cutting your own wrists. 

It’s an idle thought, like the drawings you do in the corners of your notes on 8th-century literary tradition. It doesn’t push or pull on you the way it did in Lettenhove. For one, sodomy in Oxenfurt and the surrounding territories is a misdemeanor, something to be squared away via a hefty fine and hardly worth noting on a criminal record; the students in the poetry departments call it _the luxury tax_. 

For another, your father is very far away indeed. 

You indulge your worst habits there at Oxenfurt; you find comfort and safety in the arms and mouths and beds of people who span the whole range of gender and manner of appearance. You excel at your studies, much to the chagrin of your father, who as per your agreement must therefore keep funding them. You can _breathe_ in Oxenfurt, despite the walls of the city being twice as high as those back home.

Still, there are days when it gnaws on you more strongly than others. Whole weeks of Elven Translations class skipped; projects gone unfinished and slapdashed together at the last moment. It’s when you miss two lessons in a row of Advanced Composition, an upper-division course you had to beg and scrape your way into as a first-year by providing samples to the department lead, that someone comes to check on you. 

You don’t know how to tell your Advanced Composition professor when he knocks on your door that you have not been Advanced Composing because you have been unable to get out of bed, so instead you let him into the room and allow him to draw such conclusions for himself. 

He looks around the room and nods, just once. He’s a younger man, certainly quite young to be an Oxenfurt professor, but old enough that you can tell you aren’t the first disaster this man has encountered and you are unlikely to be the last. 

“I find, Jaskier,” he says, because that is the name you took upon entering and it is the name you will leave with, “that wanting to die is a bit of an occupational hazard for poets.”

You start to cry, then. You realize, with a start, that you can’t think of the last time you cried, and it makes you cry harder. 

He sits there with you waiting for the crying to stop, not comforting but not unpleasantly, either, and when it’s over, he says, “If you cannot muster coming to class, I still expect to see your compositions on my desk. But take them in your own time.”

You don’t miss class after that. At least, not that one. 

You find later that it wasn’t the sense of solidarity that set you off in such great, cathartic sobbing. You’re not even really sure that wanting to die _is_ an occupational hazard of being a poet — you think maybe that being a poet is rather an occupational hazard of wanting to die. 

It was just that he’d acknowledged it. Even lying infirm and half conscious in a sickbed in your family home, your father had never called your condition anything but _difficult._

You don’t know when, or how — gradually, maybe, is the answer to both of those questions — but there comes a day when your letter opener is nothing more than a letter opener.

* * *

Now you’re just irritated, frankly, that if you die here it will mean your last performance as a traveling bard was in a _half-rate inn_ in Lower _fucking_ Posada. Even dying at the side of a real and mythical Witcher does not ease that particular sting.

When Geralt of Rivia gives his Oxenfurt-worthy speech — _kill me, I’m ready_ — you recognize the tone of voice quite easily after hearing it so long from your own throat. It’s the sound of a man who’s spent so long wanting to die that he hasn’t realized yet that he doesn’t want to any longer.

You write a song about it for him, even as they’re cutting you both loose and putting the most gorgeous lute you’ve ever fucking _seen,_ you could _cry_ , into your hands. It frightens you how easily the words come, following along with him. You’ve got half the lyrics and the entire melody composed by the time you make it down the mountainside. 

“Where’s your newfound respect,” he asks you, and it sounds so like your father and so unlike him all at once — bitter and angry, terrified and desperate — that you fix him with a defiant look on instinct. 

“Respect doesn’t make history.”

He looks at you, then, with an expression you write down later as _charmingly begrudging_. 

You realize it right then, even as you’re walking away from him — you’ll follow him anywhere. 

So long as it’s not over the edge of a cliff. 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on twitter @besselfcn.


End file.
